Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day has passed. But then, as far as I’m concerned, it is always Holocaust Remembrance Day — a perpetual and frustratingly futile attempt to come to terms with murder so vast and incomprehensible it is like pondering what came before the big bang. And yet in a corner of the world, the Holocaust is considered no mystery at all. The Jews did it to themselves to foster the creation of Israel. This is what Hamas believes.

Mahmoud Abbas, the moderate Palestinian leader, has made peace with Hamas — and it with him. Abbas had earlier acknowledged the Holocaust but recently called it “the most heinous crime to have occurred against humanity in the modern era.” This sounds like a prosaic statement of fact, but coming from a man who once held the Jews complicit in their own near-destruction, it is significant. For Abbas to have elevated the Holocaust over the Palestinian Nakba — the forced and non-forced evacuation of Arabs from Israel — is an important concession.

Not surprisingly, Abbas’s rendezvous with history was dismissed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This is Netanyahu’s default position when it comes to Palestinian concessions. Yet this time, he has a point. Hamas is indeed the terrorist organization Israel and the United States say it is. Its opposition to the mere existence of Israel is stated not just in the usual terms of Palestinian grievance or nationalism but also by a remarkable and stupendously stupid anti-Semitism.

In fact, according to the Hamas charter, it’s nothing less than a miracle that Hamas exists at all. Its enemy, the Jews, are so rich and powerful that “they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. . . . They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about.” The Jews had help, of course — and the Hamas charter names their allies: “Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others.” How the Elks and the Civil Air Patrol got left out is beyond me.

Read the article in full at the Washington Post.